Liquid Cooling Gets Sun Co-Founder’s Backing

Hardcore Computer is presenting its fluid-cooled server blades to Europe at Datacentres 2011 on 6 May in Nice, France.

The company has developed its Liquid Blade technology to address the costs of power to drive cooling systems in data centres. Sun Microsystems’ former chairman Scott McNealy always chose air cooling for servers, but the winds of change have turned him into a fan of  fluid cooling.

Power-saving Heat Dispersal

Chad Attlesey president, founder and chief technology officer for Hardcore, said, “Power demand in data centres is nearing crisis level. Energy costs are estimated at approximately half of the total overhead costs. As servers become more powerful, the situation only gets worse,” said Attlesey.

He described Liquid Blade as offering “radically improved cooling efficiency” which allows maximum computational power to be concentrated in a smaller space. This means the life of data centres can be extended by increasing the rack density.

The blades are based on Intel Xeon 5500 or 5600 processors which gives the dual-chip servers up to 12 cores but the main attribute is the fluid cooling which uses a patented coolant.

The Core Coolant dielectric fluid is clean, safe, and biodegradable, Attlesey claimed. Total submersion of components, including CPU, GPU and power supply, improves heat rejection capacity by volume to over 1,350 times that of air. This means that computer room air conditioning units can be reduced by as much as 90 percent, he added.

The reduction of power that this affords could reduce data centre operating costs by as much as 80 percent. He added that this can have a “direct, immediate and positive impact” on the centre’s carbon footprint and a consequent reduction of its impact on the environment.

McNealy Hot On Cooling

Hardcore has recruited the services of  Scott McNealy as an advisor. Re-visiting his long-time slogan, McNealy commented, “Our industry has experienced the network becoming the computer. Now we are transitioning to Cloud in a Container – closet, basement, or trailer.”

McNealy (pictured) is a recent convert to fluid-cooled systems. “Air goes everywhere but where you want it to,” he said in a recent interview with HPCwire. “[Cooling a hot server] is like trying to blow a candle out from the other side of the room.”

There is a fair amount of interest in fluid-cooled systems from companies such as Iceotope, Green Revolution Cooling (GRC) and IBM – which favoured water cooling between 1990 and 1995 but has recently returned to installing water-cooled supercomputer systems.